Squaresoft’s massively popular and eternally famous Final Fantasy II did not see a Western release until 2003.

It’s probably useless to start wondering why, but the game that was released outside of Japan as “Final Fantasy II” was actually Final Fantasy IV – a practise no video game company would ever get away with in this age of the Internet.

But it would appear that Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) did, at some point, intend to bring the game to North America (and beyond) – at least according to eBay user “fefea” who has put a prototype of the game up for sale.

A mere $50,000 will buy you the extremely rare Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge – assuming it’s real, it might be a good buy – it would make it probably the only one of its kind in the world, and assuming the RPG genre will continue to thrive in the future, a copy of this elusive beast is sure to go up in value.

The seller claims that the entire game is translated in English from beginning to end and is completely playable.

Of course, if you (like the rest of us) don’t have $50,000 to drop on an ancient video game that may or may not actually be real, you can of course pick up Final Fantasy II on a more modern console – the latest version was released in January 2012 for PlayStation Network on PlayStation 3.

Are you a big enough fan of Final Fantasy to bet your life savings, re-mortgage the house or sell your worldly possessions to nab this cartridge?

Interestingly, FF1’s first copy is with Sakaguchi. Hmm. . I remembered something on Ebay that claims that he is selling his entire video game collection which is literally an entire video game collection – every video games made, every console. It was for sale for more than 50,000 dollars, I think it’s actually more than a million bucks.

It got sold.

AussieGamer

If you’re not spending every last cent on video games, you’re doing it wrong.

LocalH

This cartridge is completely authentic. I know the seller and he’s very trustworthy. He’s also responsible for many of the dumped NES prototype ROMs that are floating around. The value in this cartridge isn’t in the binary (which he dumped and released), it’s in the authenticity of the cartridge itself. There might be hundreds of repro carts, but if it weren’t for this cart, none of those would exist.

AussieGamer

There are ways to have it verified – you should get your friend to get in touch!